The Materiality of Death - mikroarkeologi.se

Nepali dress. The priest wore a replica of the crown, and
he used clothes, shoes and other ornaments that belonged
to the deceased king. He was sitting in a tented room
which was furnished with offerings from the Royal
Palace, such as sofa, bed, and study table, together with
more personal belongings of the king, including his
briefcase and walking stick. Thursday June 14 th , the katto
ceremony of king Dipendra was held at Kalmochan Ghat.
Kalmochan Ghat is located by the Bagmati River where it
is the border between the former kingdoms of Kathmandu
and Patan, and when the katto-Brahman crosses the river,
according to the tradition, the priest is not allowed to
return again, and he is so highly polluted that the people
would not even “see his face” again. When there were
only petty kingdoms in Nepal, Kalmochan Ghat and
Bagmati River represented the kingdom’s border, and the
katto-priest was expelled from the kingdom by the
symbolic crossing of the river. Nowadays the priest is
expelled from the Kathmandu valley (Oestigaard 2005).
Durga Prasad Sapkota felt that he was forced to do the
katto-ritual, and afterwards he felt cheated. He demanded
a house and he was promised values worth 10,000
dollars, but he received only some 300 dollars, and he
aimed to sell the king’s clothes and personal belongings
he received for 10,000 dollars. He was living in his old
house at Pahupatinath because he had no other options.
According to him, the king’s flesh in the katto ritual was
a relict myth from the past. He cooked the meal himself
which consisted only of rice, vegetables and goat meat.
Some people living in the vicinity of Pashupatinath
believed, however, that the katto-priest ate the king’s
flesh, and in particularly the part of the brain where the
“third” eye is located. The priests who cremated King
Birendra said that some security guards collected small
parts of the ashes from the king which were put into the
katto-priest’s meals without Sapkota’s knowledge. It was
only symbolic, they believed, but it was a part of the
meal, because only goat meat would not have affected
and polluted the priest in such a negative way. Sapkota
could not walk openly in the streets anymore, and
especially not at the Pashupatinath area. People treated
him as being excluded from the community, and he was
in essence sitting in the backyard of his house for a
couple of years, feeling guilty and impure after the katto
ritual. The other temple and funeral priests referred to
Durga Prasad Sapkota as “the priest who became a pode”,
meaning a “toilet-cleaner” or low-caste. Everyone, except
himself and his wife, saw the katto-priest as the most
polluted man in the nation. Sapkota, however,
emphasised that he was still a Brahman, although he
acknowledged that he was impure and a katto-Brahman.
His wife also stressed that both of them were Brahmans,
and they categorically refused to hear anything about
low-caste status (Oestigaard 2005).
King Dipendra’s katto-priest was also deceived. Devi
Prasad Acharya – a 65-year old Hindu priest – was
promised that he would become wealthy if he performed
the ritual. When he realised that he was cheated, he
stopped the ritual and demanded more money, bargaining
with the Prime Minister. The priest wanted a house in
addition to the king’s belongings he was offered, and
Prime Minister Koirala promised him the house. The
ceremony continued, and the priest ate the katto-meal.
However, he received also only some 270 dollars, not a
house, and afterwards he regretted that he performed the
katto-ceremony for Dipendra (Oestigaard 2005).
An intriguing aspect regarding the meaning of rituals –
including the ethics involved in the ritual obligations and
participants’ commitments – is that both the katto-priests
were deceived and cheated, even by the Prime Minister of
Nepal. The importance was the completion of the rituals,
not the way it was done. A katto-priest was mandatory for
the rituals; keeping the promises regarding payments
were not. Although this illuminates the flexibility of
ritual praxis and logic, one cannot use this example to
legitimise other insights into death rituals for two
reasons; first, this was within the Nepali context executed
by top politicians and religious experts and second, other
practices may in the eyes of the devotees, descendants
and members of the community be perceived as more
desecrating and indeed as destroying the religious
outcome of the rituals. Nevertheless, the discrepancy
between the proclaimed and alleged cosmological
importance and benefit of the katto-ritual and the actual
performance of the rites illuminates not only parts of a
ritual logic and religious flexibility (bearing in mind that
this was the kings’ cremations and not ordinary
cremations of commoners), but also ethics involved in
religious practice. Although one may easily condemn the
way the katto-priests were deceived, the rituals were, one
may assume, religiously functional and consequently a
success, and hence in this case, the aims may legitimise
the means.
Excavating the Kings’ Bones
In February 2002, eight months after the funerals, there
was little water in Bagmati River. At that point it was
nothing more than a little stream, and most of the
riverbed was openly exposed. Hence, we knew that if
there were any remains from the cremations, we could
find them in the sand just below the cremation platform
of the royals. Since this platform is the uppermost and
upstream at Pashupatinath, there could not have been any
transportation of cremated remains from other cremations
at this spot since all the other cremations were conducted
further downstream.
As archaeologists we felt a fascination at the prospect of
going into the river in search of the kings’ bones where
they had been deposited after the cremations. Was it
actually possible to trace the remains of these particular
cremations, would the bones still be there, or had they
been carried away by the water?
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